Babbling Bogs Down Weak Thriller

MOVIE REVIEW - (1 1/2 stars) - Informational box at end of text

February 10, 1992|By ROGER HURLBURT, Entertainment Writer

``It`s a tawdry cliche about a shrink with a weakness for an unhappy woman,`` says a glib attorney in Final Analysis. He thereby sums up the psychiatrist`s sensual predicament in this disappointing thriller film.

A salt-and-pepper haired Richard Gere stars as Dr. Isaac Barr, a therapist renowned for his expert testimony in major legal cases.

Kim Basinger is wily Heather Evans, the object of his amorous intentions. Heather is the voluptuous sister of the doctor`s dream-soaked patient, Diana, played by Uma Thurman.

Despite a seemingly steamy and offbeat love triangle, Final Analysis never really gets off the couch until the last reel. The first hour of the film limps along, bogged down in dreary dialogue and, yes, mucho psycho-babble.

It`s tough enough to listen to Thurman`s troubled nightmares (``emotional trigger mechanisms``) and her accounts of child abuse related to Gere as shrink. But when Basinger`s sultry character just drops by the doc`s office to shed light on some family history, clinical procedures become ridiculously chummy.

Aside from Gere`s questionable ethics as a physician (he excels, especially, in quoting Freud and offering on-the-spot diagnoses), the good doctor makes it abundantly clear that he wants to bed Basinger -- a married lady.

Married, indeed: The woman`s hubby is a mean dude, Jimmy Evans, known to the police as a ``Greek-Orthodox mobster.`` Evans is played with overboard nastiness by Eric Roberts. The Evans` union is a loveless marriage fraught with fear and hostility.

Basinger`s battered lady also suffers from a rare malady called ``pathological intoxication.`` Just a whiff of alcohol makes her crazy ... crazy enough to commit murder.

To say more would ruin -- completely -- the outcome of this needlessly complex tale of passion, deception ... and predictability.

The brief tension that mounts in last reel of Final Analysis is courtesy of the late Alfred Hitchcock. 1958`s Vertigo immediately comes to mind, from the Kim Novak-like posturing of Basinger, to the deadly heights experienced at a derelict lighthouse.

For Gere, Basinger and company, Final Analysis is a rambling Hitchcock pastiche at best. Awkward foreshadowings of dastardly doings loom larger than the few twists in the story.